


Banal

by Exis



Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-20
Updated: 2015-09-20
Packaged: 2018-04-22 15:26:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4840619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Exis/pseuds/Exis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the dam breaks, Reid and Prentiss get lost in a moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Banal

The stupid thing was that it was exactly what everyone suspected. 

They had the profile right down to the color of his socks. They knew what would be in that shed. They knew they would probably be too late for Casey Danford, that the 48 hour mark had come and gone, and he was consistent in his patterns. They didn’t have the coroner’s report yet but Reid could predict, with a 20 minute margin of error, she had bled out seven hours and eight minutes before they had finally taken bolt cutters to the padlock.

It wasn’t a win. No four year old happily returned to a mother’s arms. No terrified, breathless woman—inevitably damaged—but still drawing life to drape a blanket over. But it wasn’t exactly a loss either. Mark Crestman, their unsub, had been taken without a single shot fired. He would confess, not that they would need the confession. He had been thrown in the back of a squad car over an hour ago, on his way to some non-descript jail cell in the same building where Reid had, just this morning, been tying strings to push pins and aligning them to points on the map that brought them here in the first place. No, the bad ones are when you miss it by minutes. When Hotch or Morgan, usually Hotch or Morgan, has to take the shot. When an hour, when someone being just a little quicker to notice that tiny detail and might have made a difference. 

This was just banal. Ho-hum. Another day at the BAU. 

There’s a strange stillness in the mopping up. Strange, because it was anything BUT still. After the climax, uniformed officers descend on the scene like termites crawling out of the disturbed woodwork. You don’t know their names, you don’t care really. But after the frantic moment of confrontation, even dozens of people walking, comparing, touching, talking, feels like someone turned off a radio you weren’t conscious of hearing in the first place. Abrupt, unsettling silence. Statements are taken, if there’s anyone to talk to. People concern themselves with bagging and tagging the hack saw, the hemp rope, the leather cuffs. Everyone suddenly has a clipboard or a baggy on hand. Occasionally you will hear the retching. When your job is to stare at decapitated, desecrated bodies it is easy to forget that for the police force of Who-Even-Remembers, Montana this is probably the worst thing they’ve ever seen. Or ever will see. The paramedics were there, procedure, but since no one fired a gun and there’s no woman over which to drape a blanket, they were just standing around. 

There were sirens, but someone turned them off after the unsub had been arrested and removed. 

Reid was still crouched over the body by the time the photography unit showed up and started snapping pictures. Usually he’d get out of their way. The tableau of ‘Dead Girl With Severed Hands’ didn’t need him in the frame. But for some reason, he just stayed where he was. The person snapping the pictures either didn’t care or just didn’t know how to politely ask him to move. Either way, it didn’t matter. 

Banal. The word looped through his head like a drum beat. This was their fifteenth case since the start of the year. This was the 387th woman he had seen dead in person. If he included photos, the number just got depressing. 

JJ was on her phone. Crouched where he was, next to the body, he could make out her easy, circular pacing. More than the rest of the team, her job was still unfinished. Yes, they had paperwork to file, photos to unpin, go bags to reassemble. But JJ had responsibilities to the press, to the families, that extended past the click of the handcuffs. 

Hotch was texting. Strauss maybe? Maybe he was making arrangements for picking up Jack when the plane landed. He had responsibilities. 

Morgan was talking to one of the LEOs. It really didn’t matter about what. He was smiling. Not happy, but easy. The expectations of what he brought to the team, his physical dominance, had uncoiled and he was languid in it. No guns to shoot, no doors to kick. 

Rossi had gone back down to the station to start packing things up and handle any issues in booking Crestman. Or, as was more likely the case, to get away from the minutia of the crime scene cleanup. 

Emily Prentiss was staring at him. 

Her eyes were burning. Her arms were crossed across her body, standing in front of the ambulance that had no purpose to serve here. Her focus was both laser-like and…blank. It was if she could not stop looking, but looking had produced no thoughts, no content. Banal, Banal, Banal. It hummed in him, looping over and over. His brain was a frantic place. Unbidden, and often unwelcome, thoughts and connections whirled through his consciousness, pictures emerged, whole paragraphs of text reproduced themselves at speeds he could not verbalize. It was uncomfortable, it was sheer pleasure, it was, in and of itself, banal as he had long-since learned that outside of strong opiates, extreme pain, and sleep it was his constant state of being. It could not be changed. But now it had ground to a halt, focused and recursive, on this one word. Over and over and over. 

He was crouched over a woman whose hands were severed with a saw blade, barely sharp enough to do the job. She had begged. She had screamed. She had been ready to pass out from the terror, the blood loss, the pain and yet hung on desperately. Had she thought about her children? Her parents? At what point did she cross over from hoping, that sliver of possibility that this might end, and accept that she would die? 

Banal: so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring. Devoid of freshness, hackneyed, trite. Bland, humdrum, vapid. Nothing. Nowhere. Endless.

The force of finally standing up (how long had he been crouching?), the bolt of pain in his knees, the invisible pressure from focus Prentiss refused to release snapped through his whole body with a force that made him unsteady. He turned and found her eyes with his, sharing her focus. Eye contact was usually uncomfortable for him, too much pressure, but this felt easy, necessary. Suddenly, in a sea of people, they were alone. All at once, with unusual clarity, he understood. They were together in their numbness, a profound lack of pain. They were together in the looming question of what is taken from you in this job, what lack you require, to be here like this. 

He felt this before, of course. The shock at the lack of shock. The question as to whether he was even human anymore if he can repress his revulsion, his fear. The old line that, ‘when the job stops getting to you, you have to get out’ is thrown around, but it was paradoxical in and of itself. If the job never stops getting to you, you cannot do the job. And it costs. Hankel, the drugs, the knee, the crutches, the scars. Those costs are quantifiable. You pay in nightmares and mixed drinks and going home alone. They never discussed, in fact patently AVOIDED discussing, the other way you pay. With pieces of yourself. With your ability to feel, to find connection, to trust, to love. The other stuff was easier. 

But…Emily. He knew without asking, without needing to ask, that she was drowning in it. It was crushing her. And between that and the loop in his head, he was suddenly and totally overcome by a need, a desperation, to be released from the emptiness. And that was not something he had felt before. Not like this, not in the middle of the crime scene, and certainly not when it was being shared with someone who actually, truly got it. He felt consumed by it. 

Her eyes so mirrored his own need, he was almost momentarily ashamed for making her wait. 

He could not think, so he did the only thing he could think of. 

With sureness that couldn’t be any more unfamiliar to him, with something akin to patience, he walked towards her. It felt like it took hours, or seconds. He was totally out of step with time. When he reached her, he wrapped one hand firmly around her neck, amazed by the softness of her skin, slid the other down the side of her ribs, affixing it to the hollow of her hipbone, deliberate in the sensation of sliding his hands down her body, and he kissed her so hard that the force of it drove them both back against the metallic walls of the useless ambulance with an audible clang. 

It was desperate. One of her hands found the edge of his pants and she fisted the seam for leverage. The other wrapped itself into the softness of his hair, curling in a way that both hurt and felt like a hum of electricity and pleasure that ran through to his knees. The kissing was artless, perfect. They punished each other for the need to breath by only coming back harder, wetter, more forcefully. A whimper gave him the cue to use the firmness of the ambulance and his leverage on her hip bone to shift her hips up to his. She used the sheer strength of her legs and the one hand fisted in his clothing to hold herself in place against him, The friction against his hard cock delicious, and she was so wet he could smell it, even though her very professional, impersonal attire. But none of that mattered. Sex was the furthest thing from his mind. They were fulfilling a different need, more primal, a need for closeness and symmetry. The need to feel. The need to be felt. 

A wave of satiation ran through him, her leg muscles relaxed. Back on the ground, she released his hair, he moved his hand to her face, and kissed her again. These were slow, soft. This was comfort. Every lover he had ever taken had remarked on his lips, how impossibly soft they were for a man. They held each other gently, closely, and he imagined himself kissing away every nightmare, every glass of wine she drank alone at three in the morning, unable to put whatever horror they had just seen out of her head. He kissed the nineteen year old Emily who had never known it was possible to feel empty in that way. With each slow pass of his lips, he felt her tense, twisted muscles uncoil themselves, become supple and liquid against him. 

And then, just as strangely as it began, it was over. 

Being pressed together like that, he hadn’t really looked at her face. When he pulled back enough to see her, he caught her breaking just in time. Her face was crumbling, visibly. She was using every ounce of strength to hold herself together. He didn’t think, he just turned them around so that he, now, leaned against the ambulance (why hadn’t the fucking paramedics left?) and she sobbed into his shoulder. It came in waves, in waves. Tight, quick sobs, almost soundless, and he listened as she struggled to breath around them. He might have cried too. He understood. Instead, his release was letting himself bury his face in her hair, smelling her, enjoying the sensation of holding and being held, something he so often denied himself. He placed tiny, almost imperceptible kisses on her neck, letting his mind be completely dominated by skin, smell, the pressure of her weight against him. One hand traced small, calming circles on the small of her back. The other just…held on. 

The crying slowed, then stopped. Piece by piece, their bodies separated, recreating the distance between them. He hadn’t realized he had his eyes closed until the last sensation of her left him. He opened them and suddenly reality snapped back into place. He had basically made out with a co-worker. In front of most of the team. In the middle of a crime scene. And said team was now standing in a rough semi-circle around them, clearly at a loss for what to say. 

Fuck.

A thousand emotions flashed across Hotch’s face. Amusement, anger, embarrassment, consternation, confusion. But it was Morgan that spoke first. 

“Dude!” 

Neither he nor Prentiss (who he finally realized was as shocked and off-center as he was) had a response to that. 

Hotch found words, finally. “I don’t think I have to tell you both how completely unprofessional…”

“Stop talking,” Reid said, cutting off his superior. The words were out of Reid’s mouth before he consciously thought them. And to his surprise, it worked. This was not the time for that lecture, if that lecture even really needed to happen at all. 

More silence. 

“It was,” Prentiss started, looking for impossible words that might explain what they themselves weren’t able to say, even to each other. “We were both…” she started again. No, no luck. “I needed, and…we’re not together or anything, I just…” She looked visibly defeated. Her eyes met his for the first time since they separated, pleading at him to do the impossible. 

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Morrison. Those were the words that jumped into his brain which had reconnected to its frantic, normal mode of operation. No, never mind, they wouldn’t get the reference. And suddenly an exhaustion crept into him, pleasant but weighty. All he could say way, “It has been a long day. Let’s just leave it at that and go home”. 

And weirdly, everyone nodded. Possibly because no one had any idea what to say. The need to escape dramatically outweighed the need to satisfy their curiosity. Morgan was brimming with quips and questions, no doubt. Hotch was probably half ready to kill them both. JJ would try to pull him aside later, would want the heart to heart. But for now, for now, they let it go. And almost as though it didn’t happen, people snapped back into what they did, who they were. The LEOs who did NOT miss the two FBI agents dry-humping against the ambulance were either too polite or confused to mention it. Papers were signed, the coroner finally showed up for the body, the paramedics left, and everyone climbed into in to the SUV to head back to the hotel. 

Go bags were packed, they got on the jet, and went home. Everyone was weirdly silent, but that was almost okay. Reid did the mental gymnastics on the way home. Someone probably told Rossi before they even got on the jet because he had given him a smirk, but left it at that. Garcia was going to be a nightmare. He’d figure that out later. 

But then there was Prentiss. Or Emily. Or both, maybe. They both understood. Or did they? Yes, he was certain. It was the same certainty that let him curl that hand around her neck. Yes, that he understood. But the thing that comes after. He’s never understood that and he knew and it terrified him. But no, nothing comes after. That’s not what that was. He knew how to be sexless robot Spencer, boy genius, disarming. She was excellent at compartmentalizing. Everyone on the team knew how, but more importantly when, to shut their mouths. This would not appear in anyone’s incident reports. Garcia was just going to be Garcia about it, but that would be fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. 

Liar. 

When they got off the plane, something stopped him from fleeing. At least 70% of his brain was screaming at him to run to his car as quickly as possible, turn the key, go back to his apartment, and bury himself in some horribly complicated text on physics or paraphilia. But he didn’t. He lingered. He said a silent, thankful prayer he had parked in the corner of the lot. He strolled. He took way, way too long deliberately turning the key to the trunk. And by some miracle, probably in their own desire to flee, the rest of the team left the lot efficiently leaving him alone there. 

And then she was there. She also lingered. 

“I don’t know either,” she started. A rubber band of tension snapped in his chest. She didn’t need him to tell her. She didn’t need to clarify what she didn’t know. What it means, where they go from here, what those feelings were, why him, why her, why right at that moment. So he said the only thing that he could think to say. 

“There is a loneliness that can be rocked.”

“Morrison,” she said, smiling at getting the reference. He nodded. 

Suddenly, she grabbed both of his hands in hers, holding them so tightly it hurt but grounded him all the same. “Listen!” This was decisive Prentiss, who loved control and order. He felt his anxiety deflate in the comfort of that. “We don’t have to decide anything. We can talk about this or not. Monday, we are going to show up and be Prentiss and Reid, I’m going to make fun of your coffee, you are going to riddle off statistics and I’ll roll my eyes, Garcia is going to give us both shit, and then there will be a case”. 

“Because there’s always another case,” he replied. Yes. That’s what started this ball rolling down the hill in the first place. 

“And someday, sometime, or maybe never, we’ll figure out whatever it is we want to figure out”. He nodded. It was vague and it made no sense. It made perfect sense. He felt his sense of self and world view shift back into a peaceful alignment. He felt his chest expand with warmth that she understood. But that was what started the ball rolling down the hill in the first place. It made his mouth quirk in a smile. 

She let go of his hands, smiled, and turned to walk back to her own car. He just breathed for a moment. He felt blood rush back into them and only then realized exactly how tightly she had gripped him. He had the key in the door when he heard her shout, “SPENCER!” from across the parking lot. Strange (his first name), loud (they were alone, but it felt wrong), far (she walked fast and was pretty far away). Some faint, electric thrill jumped through his spine. 

“Thank you,” she said, this time at a normal volume. But from far away, in stillness of the empty parking lot, it felt like a whisper. 

“You’re welcome,” was all he could get out. Then he got in his car and drove. There was a lot to think about here.


End file.
